Design of a database and cache management strategy for a global information infrastructure

NTT Software Labs. is producing a distributed, self-configuring information navigation infrastructure designed to scale to global proportions. For reasons of large scale, unreliability (of the Internet, its connected computers, and the implementations), and the complete autonomy of the participants, a number of difficult database and cache consistency problems arise that are not solved by techniques commonly used either for the Internet (i.e. DNS), or for existing distributed database systems. This paper describes a set of strategies designed to solve these problems. In particular, it focuses on the use of third-party detection and notification of database and cache inconsistency